Politico

Leading House climate skeptic Jim Sensenbrenner appears to have landed a perch to lead investigations into global warming science.

The Wisconsin Republican is set to become the vice chairman of the House Science Committee under incoming Chairman Ralph Hall (R-Texas), Hall told POLITICO Thursday.

“With his background, his insistence, he can do the mean things that we don’t want to do,” Hall said. “I’m a peaceful guy; he likes combat.”

Sensenbrenner, who has served as the top Republican on the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming since 2007, tried to keep the panel alive to investigate the Obama administration’s global warming policies, but was shot down by GOP leadership.

Sensenbrenner agreed to take the No. 2 spot on the Science Committee in exchange for Hall’s backing in two years when his term limit runs out, according to a Republican select committee spokesman.

As one of the Republicans leading the charge against the science underpinning the Obama administration’s climate policies, Sensenbrenner is expected to take a lead role on investigations.

“I’ve had a reputation of really being a tiger on oversight,” he said in September.

Elsewhere on the Science Committee, Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) will become chairman of the Investigations and Oversight subpanel next year.

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“Clean Energy Experts” Waste $33 Million (Canadian) “Studying IGCC”
Al Fin Energy

Wednesday, December 15, 2010
“Clean Energy Experts” Waste C$33 Million “Studying IGCC”
Faux environmentalists and so-called “clean energy experts” are happy to take endless amounts of money to study energy solutions. They will not actually help you to solve your energy problems, but they will study your problems for a price, and tell you why they cannot be solved economically.
“It’s a very expensive proposition from our perspective,” said Dave Butler, executive director of the Canadian Clean Power Coalition, an association of leading electricity producers that has mandate to research, develop and advance commercially viable technologies that lower power plant emissions.

Butler’s association, in conjunction with Edmonton,-based Capital Power Corporation, spent C$33 million over the past couple years studying goal gasification technologies.

“With the technologies we’ve looked at, it’s pretty much cost prohibitive,” Butler said.

In 2007, Capital Power Corporation proposed developing North America’s first IGCC coal gasification and carbon capture plant in Alberta. The company, in partnership with Butler’s association, conducted a front-end engineering and design (FEED) study for the proposed Genesee IGCC Project, which wrapped up last spring.

Do you see the problem? The association was not actually looking at IGCC as such, but was rather looking at IGCC when loaded down with unnecessary and wasteful carbon capture. Anyone could tell you without spending C$33 million that carbon capture is a waste of money. But “clean energy experts” have a lot of expenses, and must be funded at high levels.

In reality, coal IGCC without carbon capture is quite clean and economical in comparison with most forms of energy except for NGCC (natural gas combined cycle). Let’s look at a couple of US IGCC power generation plants and compare their costs with what a Canadian IGCC plant would cost when saddled with carbon capture.
Tampa Electric Company’s Polk Power Plant, located near Mulberry, Florida, was America’s first commercial IGCC plant. Completed in 1996 at a cost of roughly $303 million, the plant is capable of generating 313 megawatts of electricity.

...the Wabash River Coal Gasification Repowering Project in West Terre Haute, Indiana, came online in 1994. The full-size commercial IGCC plant cost $417 million and can produce 296 megawatts of electricity.

...Based on the Canadian Clean Power Coalition’s research, a 450-megawatt coal gasification plant with carbon capture facilities would cost about $5 billion to build.

A nuclear fission plant producing about 1,000 megawatts of power would cost between $2 billion and $4 billion to build, according to various estimates. So you can see that the IGCC coal power plant without carbon capture is much cheaper than either a nuclear plant or an IGCC plant with carbon capture.

The nuclear plant saves money in operations due to lower fuel costs, however. And if one is soft-headed enough to fall for carbon hysteria, nuclear power is carbon-free without expensive carbon scrubbers or carbon capture.

So if you are thinking about paying “clean energy experts” to study plans for IGCC, save your money. As good “carbon hysterics”, they will be looking at the most expensive and irrational possible choices.

You will come out ahead in the long run by educating the public to elect officials who are not carbon hysterics or members of the politicised quasi-religion and pseudo-science of CAGW. See post here. H/T GWPF

By Paul Chesser

After the failure in Copenhagen last year for countries who hoped for a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, lower expectations surrounded this year’s version of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Cancun. That’s not the same as saying desires for a massive wealth transfer from developed countries to developing countries was diminished—it’s just that they went about it differently.

One effort was to put pressure on nations to create and finance a Global Climate Fund, and the creation part was successful. As the proceedings commenced, the international poverty-and-justice group Oxfam enlisted several corporations to co-sign a letter to President Obama that demanded the U.S. lead the initiative. The Hill reported:

Companies including Starbucks and Nike say U.S. officials should take the lead in creating a global climate change fund, a move that comes as some Senate Republicans are pressing the State Department to halt climate financing for developing nations.

A corporate coalition that also includes Timberland, eBay, and PepsiCo says in a letter to President Obama that the U.S. should drive creation of the fund at the ongoing United Nations climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, calling it “imperative that the United States reassert its credibility and leadership on climate change and establish a fund at this critical juncture.”

The letter read, in part:

It is imperative that the United States reassert its credibility and leadership on climate change and establish a fund at this critical juncture.

Climate change effects are global. So are our markets and supply chains. As outlined in your speech to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Summit on September 22, 2010, it is in our long-term economic interest to partner with developing countries, which will bolster their efforts to transition from poverty to prosperity through sustainable and equitable economic growth.

The establishment of an equitable, effective and accountable Global Climate Fund is just such a partnership. The U.S. should work alongside developing countries as they reduce their emissions, save their forests, and respond and adapt effectively to the climate impacts already being felt by companies and communities alike....

It is imperative that the United States lead in the creation of a Global Climate Fund, and the time to act is now. As the impacts of climate change continue to grow around the world, we must ensure that a fair, effective, and accountable fund is established so that nations are able to reduce their emissions and adapt in a sustainable way that has the confidence of all countries.

In addition to the above-mentioned corporations, the letter was also “signed” by Gap Inc., Levi Strauss & Co. and Symantec, as well as other lesser-knowns. ABC News reported on the creation of the climate fund:

The Cancun Agreements, adopted to cheers and ovations early Saturday after two tortuous weeks of talks, created a Green Climate Fund to manage and disburse tens of billions of dollars a year, starting in 2020, for green development in poor countries.

The fund also will help developing nations adapt to climate change that already has occurred, through such methods as shifting to drought-resistant crops or building sea walls against rising ocean levels and storm surges.

The accords also create a new mechanism for giving green technology to developing states and set guidelines to compensate countries that are preserving their forests.

Meanwhile another U.S. corporation made pledges to act on climate change in other talks near Cancun:

Three miles (seven kilometers) from the climate talks’ principal negotiating venue, Walmart chairman Rob Walton attended a function that addressed using everything from cattle in Brazil to palm oil in Indonesia as sustainable sourcing for the giant retailer founded by his father.

Walmart says it plans to reduce its carbon footprint over five years to what would be the equivalent of taking 3.8 million cars off the road. Much of that will come by reducing the energy used by suppliers in China, where most of its nonfood products come from.

“People are spending less time on the negotiations and shifting more focus on concrete action,” said Stephen Cochran, vice president of the New York-based nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, which works with Walmart in China and in the U.S.

With all the corporate firepower behind Cancun, you’d think there wouldn’t be a problem getting money for the Global Climate Fund. But Oxfam reports that those details haven’t been worked out yet:

Oxfam International Executive Director Jeremy Hobbs said: “With lives on the line, we must now build on this progress. Long-term funding must be secured so the Climate Fund can start to deliver, helping vulnerable communities protect themselves for the climate impacts of today and tomorrow.”

There are issues that need to be addressed, including finding the sources of new, long-term money to help fill the Climate Fund. An opportunity has been missed to establish levies on international aviation and shipping, which could have raised substantial new resources for fighting climate change in poor countries. This issue must be revisited with urgency next year. The concerns of women should be put at the heart of the new fund to ensure that those who are among the most affected, receive the funding they need.

Companies like PepsiCo and Walmart, like all good liberals, are prepared to push for global warming “solutions” only so far as it’s painless for them. But if they have to go to investors with plans to do things like contributing to a Global Climate Fund, they’d rather pressure the U.S. government to make American taxpayers pay for it. And that’s apparently what Congress plans to do in the omnibus bill, according to my friend Chris Horner. 

See post here.

Henry Payne / The Michigan View.com

Has there ever been a better illustration of the gulf between America’s political elites and Middle America?

This weekend, a delegation to the United Nation’s Climate Summit in the resort city of Cancun, Mexico that included Washington negotiators, Michigan faculty, and Ann Arbor students returned to declare that they had come to an agreement to transfer $100 billion - that’s BILLION - to Third World countries to combat catastrophic global warming. The announcement came as a brutal winter snowstorm buried the Midwest in record snowdrifts that collapsed the Minneapolis Metrodome, drove temperatures to record lows in the south, and killed five people in the Metro Detroit area.

How many people has global warming killed?

Despite last year’s Climategate scandal that have gutted climate science credibility, the United States increased funding three-fold in 2010 to a staggering $1.7 billion-a-year to fight the phantom global warming scare at a time when the country’s federal and state budgets are hobbled by a loss of revenue from the Great Recession.

Is global warming a greater threat than state bankruptcy?

While the Cancun delegation studied the diversion of another $100 billion in tax dollars to the help Third World governments build windmills, local Michigan governments like Oakland County cut its snow and salt crews by a third to meet budget - crews that were sorely missing Monday morning as semi-trucks jackknifed on slick roads, clotting roadways and forcing backup for miles.

Is global warming a greater threat than road safety?

In Atlanta last week, hundreds of poor residents shivered in line for home-heating assistance as the mercury in southern Georgia plunged into the ‘20s. Indeed, Cancun itself greeted its warming saviors with record low temperatures while climate delegates met amidst hotels full of resort vacationers honked off by 50-degree temperatures.

This is madness.

The University of Michigan sent 30 professors, students, and alumni to the Cancun Summit. “Rather than only learning in the classroom about the most complex and contentious environmental negotiations that we have ever faced, the students will get a first-hand look at how such an international treaty is worked out,” said Andrew Hoffman, a professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. Freezing, overtaxed Michigan voters may wonder whether if this is the best use of their U-M subsidy dollars.

“Last year, the masses in Copenhagen were alive with the idealistic belief that a solution to climate change was at hand. This year, the masses in Cancun are alert to the nearest bar with a deal on margaritas,” sniffed one U-M student in Cancun about the vacationers around him. “Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against tanned bikini clad bodies or margaritas. At the same time, it does give one pause when the vast majority of people just outside the conference walls are oblivious to the debate which could have a drastic impact not only on their own lives but the lives of future generations.”

Maybe these students would have learned more helping “the masses” in a Detroit warming center where large numbers of homeless are expected this year in the midst of a down Detroit economy.

While The Detroit News reports that “extreme temperatures” this winter will see an overflow of families to Detroit warming centers, Gov. Jennifer Granholm is celebrating the forced purchase of wind power - to fight global warming - by DTE in order to meet state alternative energy mandates. The expensive mandates will suck more money from Michigan ratepayers. The governor applauded the deal as Lansing has experienced record snowfall and record low temperatures this decade.

It is hard to square the rhetoric of Cancun with the reality of Detroit’s streets. U-M might expose its students to climatologist Pat Michaels who explains that even Cancun’s goal of an 80 percent carbon reduction by 2050 would have minimal effect on global temperatures. Or that diverting $100 million from the economic engines like the U.S. to create green utopias will increase poverty.

Instead, students get green mythology.

“We hope to participate actively while in Cancun, as well as share our experiences with our community upon return,” said one Mexico-bound U-M student. More likely, she’ll be sharing experiences of slip-sliding across an iced-over campus in 10-degree temperatures.  Post is here.
Henry Payne is editor of The Michigan View.com

ICECAP Note: a few actions may help. Contact the Governor’s office and complain about the inappropriate funding of green wind energy. Also if you a Michigan alumni, stop funding the school until they start providing balance and common sense in the curriculum. I know many alumni of the big universities that have stopped donating and expressed their anger to their administrations. Sure as long as the government continues its enormous bribery of the universities through funding alarmist science, it won’t immediately change things. But as that funding dries up under more congressional scrutiny, they may eventually be forced to react.